Can the internet help a local business reach a local audience? Does the internet help with the Wal-Mart problem? Let’s say you own a clothing store selling unique creations of your own design and you want to promote yourself online. OK, where do you start? Let’s say you buy a domain and set up a website. You have a hands-on approach to selling, you are a consultant and a confidante to your customer. You want to establish strong personal loyalty and use the web to help prompt users when things that might interest them arise. First, let’s imagine you are a prospective customer for this clothing store. You are new to town and are looking for something unique. You go to Google and you search for: “grand rapids clothing store.” Some telling things result:

So Google is trying to help us find localized content. They list out three clothing retailers and a map to their locations. But the first one is particularly troubling. Wal-Mart. Even more troubling is the link: http://www.visitgrandrapids.org. This is the official site of the Grand Rapids/Kent County Convention & Visitors Bureau, a non-profit organization. Hmm. That’s a problem. How did this happen? Can the internet help a local business reach a local audience? Does the internet help with the Wal-Mart problem? Let’s say you own a clothing store selling unique creations of your own design and you want to promote yourself online. OK, where do you start? Let’s say you buy a domain and set up a website. You have a hands-on approach to selling, you are a consultant and a confidante to your customer. You want to establish strong personal loyalty and use the web to help prompt users when things that might interest them arise. First, let’s imagine you are a prospective customer for this clothing store. You are new to town and are looking for something unique. You go to Google and you search for: “grand rapids clothing store.” Some telling things result:

So Google is trying to help us find localized content. They list out three clothing retailers and a map to their locations. But the first one is particularly troubling. Wal-Mart. Even more troubling is the link: http://www.visitgrandrapids.org. This is the official site of the Grand Rapids/Kent County Convention & Visitors Bureau, a non-profit organization. Hmm. That’s a problem. How did this happen? We need to contact this organization and get on whatever list it is that they have. So let’s dig in: http://www.experiencegr.com/partners-info.php Great, this must be what Wal-Mart did right? Let’s take a look: http://www.experiencegr.com/business-links.php Nope no Wal-Mart. So why is Wal-Mart there? Let’s search: http://www.visitgrandrapids.org/search.php?q=Wal-Mart Nope, nothing. Hmm, and yet they garner top billing on Google. Let’s get the full local view on Google. There’s Wal-Mart, loud and proud. Now if we set aside that Wal-Mart is dominating the local clothing store market on Google, we can see that the rest of the list is more in line with what we would hope to find.

So how do we get our business listed in Google? Simple: Go here. Fill out some forms. You’re in. Did you see it? The website field? Let’s suppose someone at Wal-Mart registered the local store with Google after they had done a search on Grand Rapids. The top result is, you guessed it, http://www.visitgrandrapids.org. Suppose Wal-Mart entered this as their website. Google took this to mean that Wal-Mart is this domain which is the top domain for Grand Rapids. By adding this url as their own, they give themselves top billing in this local search result. There may be other search terms they are “owning” for free in this way. Presumably Google values this association above all others and Wal-Mart is exploiting it. Bad Wal-Mart. I wonder what Google would do to punish our hypothetical local clothing store if we tried the same exploit? Do you think they will do this to Wal-Mart as well? Gosh I hope so. It adds insult to injury in my mind that Wal-Mart didn’t bother to submit a link to the site they are exploiting. (BTW it costs $200 to get listed).

Let’s look at Microsoft. And drill in to the local listings here. Lots of interesting differences. For one the playing field seems a little leveler. This is likely because fewer people are using it. Also look at Yahoo! The addition of a neighborhood filter is interesting, but do they really know the local market? Let’s not stop there: http://grandrapids.craigslist.org/ http://outside.in/grand-rapids-mi/places/category/clothing These links are intriguing because there are active locals reviewing stores. That means real customers. But the following links may be the most important because they were actually created by real local people:

http://viget.org/Category:Stores

http://www.grnow.com/

http://www.localfirst.com/members/shopping

Hopefully this little primer will give you some leads on how to promote your business online. Submitting to these directories is important for establishing a presence for your store, but what may be more important is realizing how these systems connect and work together to promote your store. Submitting to these directories will not cost you any money, just a couple hours and you’ve raised awareness of your website. The fact that Wal-Mart knows how to exploit these systems does not endear them. It does raise a question about just how knowledgable you need to be in order to compete online. In fact, I’ve hopefully raised a lot of questions about just what it takes to communicate to a local market. What is the best directory to be listed on to reach Grand Rapids? Well, all of them of course. If you ask your customers how they found you, that can help inform your decision. It would be great if there were a definitive guide. That would likely make the problem of reaching a local online audience easier to solve. But no one has owned this as of yet. There have been a number of efforts I would hate to overlook (http://www.searchgrandrapids.com/) but for now it’s better to cast yourself broad. If you can’t find yourself, submit your site.